It was during Donald Trump’s recent election that I fully understood that his opponents didn’t just dislike him but hated him. It was a hatred that was palpable and even unnatural. People, who are usually rational and mild manner turned into raving lunatics when talking about Trump. This irrational behavior has a name. It is called TDS for Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Its Wikipedia essay is entirely slanted and does not capture the hatred and vitriol that flow like sewage from the pens and mouths of the Left. To anyone who tuned into CNN, MSNBC or The View the day after the election, they would have thought the world had ended. We weathered 16 years of Clinton and Obama’s storms, so the average Democrat will survive Trump. The Woke advocates on The View, maybe not.Â
The late columnist Charles Krauthammer, who was a psychiatrist, coined this term in 2003 about George W. Bush. No fan of Trump, he later defined it as a Trump-induced general hysteria that produced an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in Trump’s behavior.
Contrast this with the following. In an issue of Psychology Today, Dr. Alex Pattakos explained TDS as a derogatory term used to describe a form of toxic criticism and negative reaction to former President Trump’s statements and political actions. Journalist Fareed Zakaria defined TDS as hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people’s judgment.
The day after the election, I experienced it personally. I was talking to a friend, who I knew did not like the president-elect. I made an innocent comment that I did not like how poorly his own party treated President Biden. His response quickly segues to Trump and says that he is devoid of character and was a serial adulterer because he had five children by three women.
To me this seems like a selective accusation. Trump is not a Catholic, but I sense a transformation in him this past year that may give lie to these sentiments. Many presidents were philanderers, but this is a stretch. I believe his wandering days have been over for a good while.
This begs the question as to why so many people hate Trump. I think the explanation is comparable to when the Catholic Church used to burn heretics at the stake. The reasoning for such a horrible punishment was based on the belief that their heresies were leading faithful Catholics into loss of faith, sin and the loss of their immortal souls.
Trump had been a solid Democrat until 1987. From then on, he vacillated between many different affiliations. But because of the serious changes in the Republican Party, especially their tax and economic policies, which appealed to him, in 2015 he announced he was a Republican candidate for the presidency. This not only upset his Hollywood friends but also many stalwart Republicans who despised him as well.
According to party policy on the Left, everyone must adhere to the party ideology or face banishment and even worse. Because Trump had deviated from his Democratic orthodoxy, since 1987, he was summarily cancelled. This way of thinking is called Polylogism, coined by economist Ludwig Mises and first applied to Nazis and Marxists.
During all his campaigns, Trump had to reach the voters amid an information climate that has been dominated by the mainstream media which was nearly 100% against him. In 2024, thanks to his family, his trusted advisors and friends at Fox News he was able to do an end run around the hard-core press by appearing on many podcasts, especially the enormously popular Joe Rogan.
His appearances on other popular podcast were at the suggestion of his youngest son, Barron. I think this proves that even at the age of 79, Trump is not to set in his ways to listen to new ideas from a much younger generation. But his ability to meet voters on their own level was very appealing. As a result, Trump’s victory was the greatest comeback in American political history since Richard Nixon in 1968.
Unlike Nixon, Trump never left the public stage. The media and the Democrats continued to kick him around non-stop. The ensuing election was characterized by a level of lying that I had never witnessed in all my years. The Democrats were projecting their litany of undemocratic moves, such as their support for Roe v. Wade, the most undemocratic Supreme Court decision since before the Civil War and their removal of Biden from the presidential ticket.
As if one Russian conspiracy was not enough, just before the election there were reports of Russian election meddling. In his article for the WSJ, Holman Jennings Jr. opined that Russians were accused of sending bomb threats to polling places from internet addresses. He also cited that MSNBC thought all the fuss about Russian attempts to interfere with election were done to help Trump win back the presidency. You wonder when the media will ever learn.
One pundit accused Trump of being anti-democracy because he supported to Constitution of the United States with its Electoral College and Separation of Powers. This incredibly stupid statement fails to understand that we are not a democracy but a republic. One must also understand that a pure democracy quickly leads to a mobocracy and the rise of a supreme power. The Democrats understanding of a democracy rests on the concentration of power in a chief executive. This is a euphemism for a dictator. Like so much else in identity politics, their words always mean something different.
While both sides tossed epithets as if they were hand grenades, most of Trump’s focused on Harris’ Berkeley roots and Marxist agenda, which were right out of the Woke Handbook. Her continual dodging of reporters’ questions on this point served to underscore his criticism. The worst use of the language was to characterize every comment from the Republican opponents as hate speech. This mindless pejorative is a result of the identity culture of the Left.
One of the biggest lies the press perpetrated centered around the 2020 election. The Biden family, and the people around him were cognizant of Joe Biden’s impaired mental cognition. In a giant conspiracy to fool the public until after election day, assisted by a complicit media and those in direct contact with the president, such as Vice-President Harris, hid the reality of his condition from the public until it was too late.
Peggy Noonan of the WSJ has never had any love for Donald Trump. He has clearly been in her gunsights for many years, but I would say that she does not seem motivated by hatred, but perhaps more by the annoyance and crudeness of his populist style. After she emptied her spleen on his choices for his cabinet, she turned her fire on his vanquished foes. Here is some advice that I consider to be entirely wrong, she opined. In Time Magazine, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said two days after the election that they should Go back to the future. It amounted to a battle plan for the Democrats to undermine the Trump’s presidency as they had done in 2017.
Resist became her operative word. Go back to mass mobilizations. (An insurrection?) Peace protests (Black Lives Matter?) Slow down confirmations and expose Republican extremism. We just endured an election, and the Republicans were found to be mainstream, unlike her Woke agenda and confiscation of American wealth. Searching for middle ground is foolish she implies. This sounds like a plan for political warfare. Noonan is right, this is not only bad advice but crazy advice. Maybe that is what is wrong about the Democrats. They are just plain crazy!
The Democrats swift removal of President Biden after his self-destructive debate performance and the installation of Kamala Harris in his place, never sat well with the general public. The president also complicated the Harris campaign with his pound of revenge, with his claim that Trump voters were all garbage.
The projectionist news media used all these falsehoods to poison the campaign of the former president. The closest to a blatant lie Donald Trump evoked were his constant hyperboles. I think he deliberately keeps his speech simple and to the point, so it doesn’t sound as if he is talking down to his crowds. But I think his constant use of the terms, the greatest, first, the biggest on can get annoying at times, though there isn’t any obfuscation in it, such as is found in the twisted syntax of Harris’ unintelligible word salads.
The Democrats often say that Trump voters are a deranged voting bloc. I will admit Trump followers can sometimes wear their passions on their sleeves, and be loud and highly argumentative, yet it is seldom laced with a strong dose of hatred and death wishing as I have found in the Democratic camp. One need only check out X to read the violence-laced tweets of several Biden supporters last summer, including some well-known celebrities, who hoped that the next shooter was a better shot the next time. Talk like this scares me since I believe the Left is far more prone to violence than the Republicans.
The Democrats spent the few weeks after the election in deep deflection on just how they lost. They blamed everyone they could, except the obvious. Michael Ramirez, a cartoonist in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlighted this with a backdrop of signs the proclaimed Woke, Victimhood, Open Borders, Big Government, Soft on Crime and many other posters citing Democratic policies. The baffled Democratic leaders in the cartoon sighed and said How is it even possible to lose to Trump? Party leaders were so dense they could not understand this. Many of them said that they had to double down on their message for the next four years. This is just more plain craziness!
Albert Einstein described insanity as trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. This is a sign of a mind that has a very weak perception of reality and could lead to a complete divorce from the real world.
In 2010, I published an essay for my blog, The Gospel Truth. I raised the question, Is Liberalism a Mental Illness? Now I am not a physician, let alone a psychiatrist. I do not pretend to know or understand anything much about mental illness. I seem to get in trouble every time I try to use such terminology in my writings. For example, I used the term spilt personality with regards to the Catholic Church and Vatican II in the early 1960s. Some people took offense.
I do have three History degrees and have taken a couple courses in philosophy and psychology. I do know that mental illness is intimately tied to one’s perception of reality. Perennially optimistic or pessimistic people are borderline cases who are susceptible to going over the edge when it comes to reality.
The meaning of liberalism has changed a great deal over the last 150 years. It has transformed from a conservative philosophy of a laissez faire system of government hands off, to an extremely intrusive centralized power that wants to control industrial production. Big Government is their means to affect a social and economic revolution that wishes to concentrate power in their hands in perpetuity.
Its origins go back to 18th century France which has given us nearly 300 years of revolution. It has weakened the basic pillars of society with its relentless attacks on the family, the church and private property. Its derivatives include Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Liberalism. The late Joseph Sobran once said: If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion. The columnist added liberalism is also just a frog in the pot type of social engineering that seeks the same sort of social order as communism, which is a secularist, materialist society in which power is centralized in executive branch.
All these ideologies are destructive of human freedom and morality and are descendants of the same misanthropic school of revolution that was hatched in the coffeehouses of Paris. Their kind of thinking is all about change. This is not just the change in the political regime but an impossible change in human nature. Hillary Clinton once said we are not interested in social reconstruction—it’s human reconstruction. Barack Obama followed up with his promise, just before his election in 2008, We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
Liberals believe they can mold people into the docile robots they envision will institute their utopian dreams on earth where there is no poverty, illness, war, disease or maybe even death. It is all just a crazy pipe dream, a pie on earth kind of delusion that has substituted utopian fantasies for reality.
As a result, the liberal philosophy has infected every level of our lives and has departed from the realm of reality in many ways. The most obvious and dangerous from the standpoint of a human culture has been identity politics and its attendant spin-offs. By this I mean that there has arisen a hierarchy of diverse racial, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religious and social classes. For example, there used to be two genders, male and female, which dates to the Book of Genesis. Presently, there are 81 different sexual identities. We have gone from homosexual marriages to the perverted idea that men can menstruate and have babies.
Our genders are no longer a work of nature but assigned at birth. Transgendered women, who are still biological men, engage women in sports, share their locker rooms and bathrooms. All this craziness has been the Woke child of liberalism, a deviation which has escaped from reality. The results of the recent election show that Americans have categorically gotten off the crazy train. They must have listened to author Jim Butcher, who put it best: we have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.
